The Question My Husband Asked Me That Made Me Realize He Barely Knew Me At All
michaelheim | ShutterstockI never realized how little my husband actually knew me until he asked me one question on the morning of our daughter's fifth birthday party. I was in the midst of packing multiple grocery bags with party supplies. I’d splurged on a bouncy house at our neighborhood community center because I simply couldn’t fathom the prospect of 15+ preschoolers descending on our home.
When he first asked me the question, I thought he must be joking. I also didn’t find it funny. Why come to me with that question, especially after the week we’d had, and especially on the morning of our daughter’s birthday party?
Then I realized he wasn’t joking, and that’s when I started laughing. He was asking me in all seriousness, which was absolutely hysterical. I laughed until tears pooled at the corners of my eyes. It was an unhinged, somewhat maniacal laugh.
I wasn’t sure if the tears were from laughing, or if the tears were from the deep sadness welling within me — the sadness I would proceed to tamp down until it was neatly pressed in the pit of my stomach.
Sadness was a luxury I simply did not have time for that day.
I was so overwhelmed with motherhood that I barely had time to feel sad
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It had already been a very sad week. On the prior Tuesday, Donald Trump was elected President. We’d all been so certain that Hillary Clinton would win. I had brought my biracial children into one world, a world ripe with hope and change, and now I suddenly found myself in another.
The morning after the election, I awoke not quite knowing how to face the day. But the day was descending, ready or not. It was 5:30 a.m., and our son was already fussing in his crib. I fumbled in the dark while my husband continued to sleep. Toddler in hand, I beelined for the coffee maker. Absurd sentences tumbled from my lips, like, “Please stop licking my knee,” and “Please take your Legos out of the peanut butter.” Parenting small children leaves little time for mourning.
My daughter, never a morning person, had to be wrestled from bed a half hour later. My husband, also never a morning person, was still sleeping.
My daughter wanted to wear her party dress, and I had to explain to her for the umpteenth time that her birthday party wasn’t until Saturday. I was in no mood for power struggles.
I already felt bullied, beaten, and utterly defeated.
My daughter announced that she would not be inviting Donald Trump to her birthday party because he is mean. She asked if he was going to shoot lava at her because she is brown. She inquired about his toy collection and the color of the walls at his house. She thought gold walls were pretty cool.
I turned my attention to dressing her 16-month-old brother, for whom Obama would be no more than a face in a textbook. As he transitioned out of his pajamas, he correctly identified his ears, nose, mouth, and belly button. There was applause, cheering, high-fives. Then the tears welled. The victory was so small, and my sense of loss was so stifling.
But there was no time to dwell on our country’s crumbling future. No time to process, no time to grieve. There was never time.
My husband stumbled into the kitchen, still half asleep, and took the mug of coffee I had waiting for him. The kids descended on him, but he was running late, as usual. He gave them hasty kisses, then rushed out the door to catch the MAX train to school.
I had daycare bags to pack, breakfast to administer, shoes to put on. I cursed my husband, yet again, for buying our toddler lace-up shoes. My son didn’t want his shoes on. He stamped his feet and pounded his fists. I felt not frustration but envy. I wanted to throw a tantrum, too. I wanted to melt into the floor right alongside him.
Toast and bananas were hastily served, crusts and peels haphazardly discarded, children forcefully urged to hurry. I checked my phone, bypassing the headlines to look up recipes for German chocolate cake. White supremacists aside, we would still be descended upon by 15 preschoolers come Saturday, and they would still expect cake. Also, balloons. God help us if we forgot the balloons.
It was already past 7:30 a.m. I was running late, as usual. There was still the ritual Lining Up of All the Things, then the ritual Taking All the Things to the Car, the ritual Strapping In of the Children. Then the ritual Unstrapping of the Children, followed by the ritual Schlepping of the Bags While Carrying a Toddler and Corralling an Almost Five-Year-Old, followed by the ritual Removal of Shoes and Outerwear.
After the daycare drop-off, I refilled my coffee and made a mad dash to the bus stop to catch the 20 downtown. I was grateful to nab a seat by the window where I could rest my forehead and quietly cry. I’d have to take this same bus home at rush hour (standing room only), pick up the kids from daycare, leave them with a neighbor, give her $30 to order a pizza, then drive back downtown for a work event that evening.
When my husband arrived home around 7:30 p.m., dinner would be done, and the kids would almost be ready for bed. And when I stumbled in the door two hours later, I would profusely thank him for handling bedtime all by himself.
I had evening work events about twice a month, and even though I coordinated all the childcare and meal planning, I always made sure to profusely thank my husband for taking care of his own children while I was out providing for my family.
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I knew that my morning bus ride was my only opportunity to cry. Then I would have to tamp down my sadness until it was neatly pressed in the pit of my stomach. It was a luxury I simply would not have time for that day.
I didn’t end up making German chocolate cake for my daughter’s fifth birthday party. I bought a cake from Fred Meyer that had the requisite pink frosting and perfect Happy Birthday cursive that she could not yet read.
I went to the dollar store, trying to brighten my somber mood with Mickey Mouse balloons and polka dot tablecloths. I bought useless plastic trinkets to fill up gift bags, which children would likely play with for approximately six minutes before they broke, were rolled into a dusty, forgotten corner, or were smuggled by parents, sick of useless plastic trinkets, into the trash.
I was packing grocery bags with these polka dot tablecloths and useless plastic trinkets when my husband approached me, looking somber.
He said he had a question. I hoped his question would be: “How can I help?”
Typically, he was proactive when we hosted social events, but on that particular morning he had been quiet and brooding.
His question was not: “How can I help?”
His question was: “Are you cheating on me?”
My hands hovered above the Trader Joe’s bag. I searched his face, looking for a glint of mischief in his eyes. I realized he wasn’t joking.
I mentioned this moment in a story I wrote a few months ago — the sheer absurdity of my husband’s notion that I might have even an ounce of emotional or physical energy to engage in an affair with someone else.
When, I asked in the aforementioned story, would I be having this supposed affair? Was I sneaking out of the house before our son’s 5:30 a.m. wakeup call? Was I meeting this mystery man at the park on my weekend run? At the back of the bus while commuting to work? In the bathroom during Saturday story time at the library?
It was in that precise moment that I realized how little my husband was paying attention.
How alone I was.
How it was possible to share a life, home, and children with someone who didn’t see or understand me.
I had been attributing my husband’s moodiness over the last few days to the fact that a misogynistic white supremacist had just been elected President. But apparently, he’d been moping about our private life.
During that season of our marriage, we were being intimate about once a week. I wasn’t, gasp, withholding anything from him. I just wasn’t that into it. Later, I would find out that I was experiencing postpartum dyspareunia, i.e., painful intercourse after childbirth, which nearly half of women experience at three months post-birth and one in five still experience after 18 months. Did my doctor tell me this? No. She crinkled her eyebrows and said, without much conviction, that “maybe” my walls had been stretched thin during childbirth. She could prescribe a cream that “might” help. She never gave the condition a name or told me I was not alone.
My husband thought I was making up the pain, because we all know that women love to invent their own pain. He thought it was just an excuse. It never occurred to him that we might be able to mutually pleasure ourselves in other ways. Neither did I suggest it.
Frankly, I just wanted to quietly and efficiently fulfill my wifely duty so I could go to sleep.
I certainly had empathy for my husband’s frustration with the current state of our private life. But I couldn’t, for the life of me, understand how or why he made the leap to the assumption that I was having it with someone else. And even more confounding, why he chose to broach this topic 30 minutes before our daughter’s fifth birthday party.
After I finished my maniacal laughing and crying, after I tamped down my Great Sadness, I began carrying grocery bags to the car. Then I loaded our son and our daughter into their respective car seat and booster. We drove the 10 blocks to the community center in silence.
I was grateful for the cheerful woman at the community center who helped us set up, for the trickle of parents and children through the door. For the next few hours, I smiled and made small talk. My son stayed close, clutching my hand or begging for my arms. At one point, my husband approached and stood next to me.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
There I was, surrounded by people and standing next to the man who called me his soulmate. My daughter was rushing past me in blurred streaks of color (finally she got to wear her party dress!) and my son was nestled on my hip.
I had never, in my 36 years on the planet, felt more alone.
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On the fateful Tuesday that preceded our daughter’s fifth birthday party, I had, through the horror, felt more connected to my husband than I had in months. For one evening, we shared the same grief and pain.
Eight years prior, on November 4, 2008, we’d experienced a very different election night together. When the election results were announced and Barack Obama declared the winner, we were elbow-to-elbow with fellow revelers at a bar in Washington, DC, the city we then called home. Everyone was cheering, hugging, and sloshing beer.
My husband and I had been married for four months, and my world was positively bursting with hope. Our lives stretched out before us; our love would conquer all. We’d have beautiful children whose skin would be the same nut-butter brown as the President of the United States. There had been so much stacked against us, and look how far we’d already come. Look how far our country had come. The future glimmered, vast and limitless.
On November 8, 2016, my husband and I were on our couch in Portland, Oregon. Our kids were sleeping (finally sleeping) in the other room. There were no strangers to be hugged, and the cheers poised at the back of my throat were making a slow, painful retreat, replaced instead by rising bile.
When I had poured a glass of wine, it was intended to be celebratory, but as my sips turned to gulps, the wine became a coping mechanism to blur the edges of the new, harsh, unbelievable reality that stared at us from the bloody map on the screen.
Since that evening, we’d had no time to process together. I reoriented my attention to the logistics of getting through each day intact, and my husband reoriented his attention to his graduate program.
And now, standing in a community center amidst the gleeful shrieks of children, that expansive feeling of hope felt lost to me.
Hope for my country, hope for my children, hope for my marriage. Hope for a future in which I could rebuild the identity I’d lost somewhere between that bar and this bouncy house. Hope for a future in which motherhood and marriage wouldn’t take and take and take. Wouldn’t cast me into the shadows. Wouldn’t render me invisible.
Don’t get divorced, they say. You’ll end up lonely.
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And yet, I often wonder if married straight mothers in nuclear families feel the loneliest of all. They don’t typically have time to sit with that loneliness, to process or acknowledge it. They typically tamp it down so they can carry on with their days.
Sometimes they medicate against it, or doctors medicate them. The housewives of yore that we so love to romanticize dedicated their lives from sun-up to sun-down to essential unpaid labor that was rarely appreciated and often disregarded as not “real” work. Turns out, a pretty shocking percentage of these “happy” housewives were (and are) actually on medications— including opioids, amphetamines, and benzodiazepines. These pharmaceuticals were (and are) typically prescribed by their doctors because, of course, we can’t have unhappy housewives ruining the happy family/marriage myths in which we place so much cultural and social stock.
And as motherhood has become more demanding, more isolating, and more often layered on top of paid work, mothers have started to drink “more frequently and more heavily” than in decades past.
How, as I asked myself during my daughter’s fifth birthday party, was loneliness even a viable emotion for me to feel?
On a typical weekday, I had 60 minutes to myself, 30 minutes to and from work. During the remaining 17 waking hours, someone always needed something from me. More accurately, multiple people always needed multiple things from me.
But as I learned in my marriage, you can feel lonely surrounded by people.
You can feel lonely with a child tugging at your hand and another nestled on your hip. You can feel lonely while your husband is standing next to you, or even on top of you.
And, as I’ve learned since my divorce, you can feel connected and fulfilled while alone in your bed.
In the seven years and five months that elapsed between my daughter’s fifth birthday and the email I sent to my husband asking for a separation, I continued to tamp down my sadness while grasping for shreds of hope. In 2020, Joe Biden was elected President, and we took a jubilant family selfie, all wearing matching T-shirts. I posted it to the Pantsuit Nation Facebook Group, where it proceeded to rack up 5,300 likes and over 200 comments praising our “beautiful family.”
But Biden was not Obama, and so much had changed since 2008. Whether at the hands of COVID, police officers, or wildfire smoke, people everywhere were struggling to breathe.
I was no longer sure I believed in hope — for the world, for my children, for my marriage.
I watched Trump get re-elected in 2024 while sitting alone on my couch. By then, I was knee-deep in a messy divorce, feeling deeply betrayed by my country, and deeply betrayed by the man who was trying to take everything and to whom I had already given too much.
I was sad and angry, yes, but I didn’t feel lonely that night. In fact, I felt a renewed sense of purpose. I was rebuilding my life, focusing on what I could control, spinning webs of interdependence. Trump and his cronies wanted me to feel helpless, hopeless, and isolated. Instead, I was claiming what was mine to claim: my autonomy, my connection, and my joy.
Kerala Goodkin is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication, Life Beyond Marriage.
